H-P - All posts tagged H-P

While Oracle co-president Mark Hurd is working to get his own sales force up to speed, he may end up as a key factor in helping those interested in making a counter-bid for Dell Inc. get their deal closed.

The window is rapidly closing for those interested in taking a shot at buying the PC maker. The current buyout bid for Dell specifies a \”go shop\” period that ends Friday at midnight, by which any interested bidder needs at least to inform the company\’s board of directors that it wants to pursue a formal bid process.

As Hewlett-Packard prepares for a much-anticipated meeting with shareholders this afternoon, one could wonder if former Autonomy CEO Mike Lynch is emerging as the Walter Hewlett of this particular showdown.

Bloomberg News

A quick recap: The H-P meeting, which kicks off in a few hours, is expected to focus on what’s become the mother of all blundered acquisitions, which is the company\’s $11 billion purchase of Autonomy Corp. in 2011.

H-P has since taken massive impairment charges to write off most of the deal, which it now says was overpriced and tainted with fraud due to accounting shenanigans at the U.K. software firm. Lynch has denied the allegations. On Wednesday, he fired back again accusing the H-P board of acting in an “aggressive and unusual manner throughout this episode.”

A prominent proxy advisory firm wants to kick him out of the Hewlett-Packard board, but H-P board member Marc Andreessen at least got the Queen of England’s endorsement.

Andreessen was one of the first recipients of the Queen Elizabeth Prize for Engineering, a new award given to individuals or groups for “groundbreaking advance in engineering which has clearly created significant benefit to humanity.”

With their 12% drop at the closing bell, shares of Hewlett-Packard Co.
delivered one of their worst one-day performances since 2000 and their second historically bad slide since October.

Investors dumped the stock after H-P disclosed accounting irregularities tied to its $10 billion purchase of Autonomy Corp. in 2011 as part of its effort to beef up its information technology business.

The dive ranks as the seventh-biggest since the halcyon days of the dot-com boom gave way to a bust, according to data from FactSet. It’s also the second big drop in just a few weeks. On Oct. 3, the stock fell 13% to its lowest level in a decade after Chief Executive Meg Whitman warned of red ink ahead and admitted it’ll take longer to turn around the tech firm.

When Hewlett-Packard Co. reported a sharp drop in profits last month, part of the blame was on a slowdown in the company’s once-powerful printer business, which is now being combined with its PC unit.

HP

H-P\’s Meg Whitman.

At the time, H-P chief Meg Whitman said the business was being “pressured on multiple fronts,” including the fact that consumers are doing less printing from home. Barclays tech analyst Ben Reitzes took this a step further on Thursday with a report taking “a deeper look into the secular challenges” being felt within the inkjet business.

H-P posted some surprising news that gadget lovers and consumers will be happy to hear: the company will be replenishing its sold-out TouchPad tablet. The company insists it is still sticking with its original plans to kill its webOS hardware business, including the TouchPad and Pre smartphones. After H-P HPQ slashed the price to $99 […]

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